The UK has lost out on the opportunity to have the world’s first production facility for plastic electronics systems due to a lack of local support by Government agencies.
Cambridge start-up Plastic Logic aims to go head to head with major consumer electronics manufacturers such as Philips by starting the manufacture of flexible active matrix displays for e-book products early next year.
The company, which spun out of Cavendish Laboratories in 2000, has secured equity funding of $100m to help fund the building of a production facility in Dresden.
According to Simon Jones Plastic Logic’s v-p of business development, the firm did consider setting up the facility in the UK but found the level of grant support more favourable in Germany. “We will also be able to build the green field facility faster in Dresden,” Jones told EW.
Jones said that support grants in Dresden amounted to a third of the total investment “which is significantly more than $100m”.
A spokesman for the DTI would not comment on this particular project but he did say that in general funds would be available for this type of investment.
“But funding may only be one of a number of factors affecting the choice,” said the spokesman. Other factors could be the cost of land and local planning regulations which may be more favourable in Dresden.
This is the second advanced production facility the UK has missed out on in recent months. MicroEmissive Displays, the Edinburgh-based microdisplay company, told EW in October that it would have chosen the UK rather than Dresden for its production facility if assistance grants had been available.A spokesman for Scottish Enterprise accepted that applying for aid can be “a lengthy bureaucratic process”.
Plastic Logic’s R&D facility which included a prototype production line is based in Cambridge. Jones said there were no plans to move R&D to Dresden and confirmed that the team of 60 people in Cambridge should grow by 50 per cent in the next 12 months or so.
Plastic Logic has received R&D support grants from the DTI in the past.
According to Hermann Hauser, director of Amadeus, an investor in Plastic Logic: “We are not only scaling up a great company - we are also creating a new electronics industry that will become a significant addition to silicon.”
The facility will produce display modules for portable electronic reader devices – a product category that is predicted to grow to 41.6 million units in 2010. It will have an initial capacity of more than a million display modules per year and production will start in 2008.